In conducting a _pleito_ at Manilla, all is done by writing; first, the charge is made out and filed; then comes an answer to the charge; then a counter-answer is put in, and that again is replied to; and so on they go for any length of time, determined by the weight of the purses of the respective contending parties, till, if no more is to be said, or if one or both of them gets tired of the expense, and the case is decided, the other, if he be a rich man, can refer the whole affair to Spain, where the same pleadings have to be again gone through, and all the vexation and expense re-incurred, besides that the decision of the case may with a little management be protracted for any indefinite length of time. This is not worse than what happens at home, and is similar to some of our Scotch cases in former times, when for a century or more one case would be agitated to gratify family dislike or prejudice. That no one may think I exaggerate, it may be as well to mention a case which is still undecided at this moment, and which originated about 1731, between the lairds of Kilantringan and Miltonise in Galloway, although near kinsmen, namesakes, and neighbours. There are few things more dreaded by the Spaniards themselves than a lawsuit with one another. Many of them, however, are glad of the chance it gives them to be revenged on people with whom they are not upon good terms. So vile is the whole law and practice relating to the testamentary disposal of property, and to such lengths have the abuses in this particular branch of it gone, that it has become a proverb among Spaniards to say that a wise man would prefer being a trustee on an estate, to being heir to it; and several people at Manilla are well known to be living on their gains from executorships, &c., having no other means of support. These persons, although their incomes are almost universally known to be so derived, are not in the least shunned as dishonest people, but are looked upon as being perfectly entitled to feather their own nests in place of performing their duty, as we should understand it to be in Britain.